Rat Trap
by spaceFairy
Summary: Apart from Chell, Doug Rattmann is the only human left alive in Aperture. What can he do but run?


Through gaps in half-shattered panels and groaning steel supports he runs, ducking under wires that hang loose from grimy test chambers, dashing through observation rooms choked in vines. He had not expected to be woken this late, he had not expected Aperture to be in such disarray, he had not expected that he would wake up at all.

But now he is awake and he tells himself his leg has healed but when he leaps over the remains of a turret and feels pain jolt through every nerve, he knows it has not and he doesn't have any pills left and carrying cube is _tiring_ and the cameras are back on and if he doesn't hide soon then _She will find them._

And she will kill him. He remembers, he remembers all too well what happened last time, he remembers-

_choking gasping can't breathe need air_

-stumbling out of his office, crawling into the cramped air vent until everyone was dead and the neurotoxin dissipated, he remembers-

_coward coward you could have saved them why didn't you save them now they're dead and its all your fault pathetic hopeless delusional _

-hiding behind panels in test chambers, dipping his fingers in propulsion gel and scrawling messages on walls, frantic and frenzied, barely remembered half-snatches of not-poems etched into every available surface, he remembers-

_"we're on the bleeding edge here. Artificial consciousness is the next frontier. I'm telling you, this is our generation's moon shot."_

_-_voices surfacing through fist-gaps in his mind, cube tells them to be quiet but they don't listen, they never listen, laughing and crying and constantly making _noise_ and don't they realise that IF THEY'RE NOT QUIET THEN SHE'LL HEAR THEM!

He grounds himself in the present (or tries to, but he will never not be able to recall the events so vividly etched into his very being) and peers into the empty test chamber.

And a girl walks in.

She is alive.

_Chell Chell Chell Chell Chell she is alive Chell Chell Chell the last hope Chell Chell Chell she can do it if anyone Chell Chell Chell_

Determination flashes in grey-blue eyes, she clutches the portal device in calloused fingers and anxiously examines the room. The door closes behind her.

"Sorry about the mess. I've really let the place go since you killed me. By the way, thanks for that."

That voice. He is alive, Chell is alive, but once-Caroline is also alive. Or as alive as a complex piece of code can be, malice built out of strings of ones and zeros in seemingly random order.

Chell examines a cube, and he shifts his weight to look around the rest of the chamber. And in doing so, his foot squeaks on the panel he is resting on. Startled, Chell looks round, hurriedly he rises, he runs to a safer shelter.

Sprinting down a dimly lit corridor, half fallen lights flickering, he stumbles, trips. Pain shoots through his leg, he sinks to the ground.

_"I know you're there. You're the only person cowardly enough to run from a brain damaged, cake loving, test subject. Who also murders people. Of course, apart from said brain damaged, cake loving, test subject, you are the only other human here. You know, because all the rest are _dead._"_

His leg is bleeding. He tears a strip of gel-stained fabric from his tattered lab coat and wraps it around his thigh in a feeble attempt to stop the blood escaping.

_"Of course, delusional as you are, you can still serve _some _purpose."_

He is too tired to run from the claw that is lowered into the corridor, too tired to protest as he is lifted up and out, too tired to say goodbye as cube falls from his arms.

He is too tired to realise that the hospital drone that bandages his leg and injects him with something which takes away the pain is not programmed to understand gratitude.

He is too tired to be surprised when he is given an Aperture Science handheld Portal Device, when a claw lowers him into a test chamber, and when the panel slides shut on the ceiling above him.

And once-Caroline is talking again; he does not understand what she is saying but he hears her and her voice is so familiar and yet so different; he recognises Caroline in her and for an instant her voice loses the mechanical lilt to it and she _is _Caroline-

But then she is comparing him to garbage and calling him a coward and it is GLaDOS again.

_"You have about 45 years to live, if you're lucky. This is going to be fun."_


End file.
